Why i join again?
To be honest here, I'm here mainly for the digital badges and the goodie, secondly is to put my software development skills into good use to contribute to open source so my skills wont get rusted and dusted in my back closet and so that in future someone else will be benefited from my contribution. thirdly, i want to make some meaningful stuff during my career break? maybe uncertainty situation (i explain this later). Finally, i want to see what kind of challenges i will face this time as every year Hacktoberfest there's always a lot of blockers, new challenges.
Which project did i contribute and why?
I contribute to ShareBite, ProjectHive, and Vizit because i find these projects are closely related to my job which is Frontend developer. i think the contribution to Vizit are way more fun and i learnt the most from it because the maintainer really pushes my limit to actually want me to make something that is more intuitive and complex. Where as, ShareBite and ProjectHive are the easier because its just small task that feel like just plain old boring work. but it doesn't mean its bad but it lead me to realize how far i have gotten in my career that i see these tasks are so easy and if i ask myself in 2022 to help me do. i think i would have run away and disappear.
What i learned?
Based on my experience of Hacktoberfest 2025, i should have directly make pull request rather than submit issues because waiting for maintainer to response "go ahead" or "sure ok" wasted a lot of my time. if i submit a PR and if it doesn't meet the criteria or the standard. maintainer will provide feedback. There are many good maintainer that really points out what i should add or remove to make my contribution meaningful. Submit an issues created another burden and wasted my precious time. I rather jump straight in to contribute and that way i learned more.
Not only that, i also learned to adopt new workflow to my SDLC, which let AI to help me complete simple and time consuming tasks such as convert data types, small algorithm, code structure. Many of us never realize how much time it save me from going into thinking loophole and over engineering. So as long as i understand the codebase and the logic behind the system that I'm going to implement. i could let AI help me faster finish some part of the code. This is not vibe coding because i reviewed my code before submit PR and maintainer will also reviewed it. This will reduce the likelihood of making poor contribution. Adopting AI tools and new workflow for software development is a must to not get replace by AI.
What are my challenges?
the biggest blocker is my emotional and mental journey that i have to go through this month as i had many bad thing going on in my career life. Yes i also decided to switch job during this month to find better opportunity. Things were not going to what i expected so i was struggling mentally and physically because i also feel sick for some random virus. Second blocker is not knowing what to contribute to some of the projects because the tasks that i can think of to contribute was done and uncompleted tasks was way over my level, searching for tasks that i can understand and manage to handle took me a lot of time.
What is my progress?
i did manage to get 6 PR and 5 of them are under review. i don't think it will make it in time. Since the contribution are done during October i guess my review will go through after November 5. Lets hope that i am the first 10000 contributor to get the free t shirt? i wont expect to get that. cause of the challenge and blocker that i had that drag me down so much.
Conclusion
This is fun, i want to contribute again next year. I hope to face more challenges to shape into a better programmer that always learn and adopt to new tools and environment. Thanks for reading this blog all the way here.
Additional note - Progress update
I'm now feel like I'm unemployed, ya that is what i think it is because my situation now are really unsure as my new job which i suppose to get an offer letter by last Monday but haven't receive any update yet. I still have another contract (job training which my new company helped me enrolled to) on me but i didn't get anymore update about it as well. My previous job i finished the notice period and got my last salary pay. Well i guess i should look for a new job? I concerned about the legal issues for having 2 contract. the period is under mid December so not sure what else i can do beside trying to find new income source.
If you would like to support and help me go through this disaster time. you can always buy me a coffee. thank you so much for reading.
This is a submission for the 2025 Hacktoberfest Writing Challenge: Open Source Reflections
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